Finding graduate programs in the UK

Prospects - Search for UK Graduate Programs by Discipline

On this site you can search by keywords more specific than broad discipline areas. Narrow your search by selecting “full-time” at the bottom. This search is most useful for interdisciplinary topics or if you’re not sure what department your topics might fall into.

The Guardian is another good search engine which considers student polling results in its ratings.

More details about the British system in general as well as alphabetic links to every UK school are available on the British Council page.

REF - Find Rankings for UK Graduate Programs by Discipline

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is an on-line ranking of UK graduate programs by discipline based on the results of an in-depth survey completed every five years; the most recent study was completed December 2014.

Click on “view by unit of assessment.” That will produce a list of disciplines, beginning with clinical medicine and scrolling through pure science and engineering, to social sciences and humanities.

Click on the discipline that most closely matches your interest.

You can view the assessment based on Overall Profile, Output, Impact, and Environment.

The resulting list includes every institution in the UK that has a graduate degree in that subject area. You can then consult the graduate catalogs—all will be online—to determine which of the top-ranked programs is the school to which you should apply. Within a school, you’ll probably need to find the department web site where you’ll find more specifics than is on the central school site.